Plane Tickets

One of the expensive/stressful/annoying things about living overseas is buying plane tickets home. It makes me wish for the days when all I had to think about was buying a ticket from Texas to California, or just between cities in the same state. Now I have to hope that no one buys the seat next to me so I can try and sleep on the 10-12 hour flight.

Also when you fly with pets in cabin (vs under the plane, I don't know anything about that, or shipping them cargo) you have to call and make sure that one of the three available spots is open on your flight (they only have three pets allowed in cabin per flight, ?!?) Then you have to buy your ticket, call the airline back and reserve an in-cabin spot for your pet. You don't pay for the pet ticket until you get to the airport and everything checks out (the airlines have to approve your carrier, the size and weight of your pet, and you have to have health travel papers for your pet too, plus whatever else is required for international travel depending on where your are going and coming from).

So I was getting pretty excited about moving home and wanted to buy my plane ticket soon so I could be sure to get my cat's place reserved too. Justin hadn't received his order yet (which tell us the dates he has to be in Texas for out processing, hence telling me what day I should fly out). So we just made our best guess as to when he would be sent to out processing and I bought my ticket.

Actually it wasn't as simple as that. I had to call United airlines a number of times (my billing address was wrong on my debit card and it caused a major delay), I timed the last two times I had to call them and each start-to-finish-get-a-person-on-the-phone was 46 minutes. Let me say that again, EACH TIME I CALLED IT TOOK 46 MINUTES TO GET A REAL PERSON. The people I eventually talked to were really nice (definitely in India), it just took for-ev-er to get to them. Oh, the best part was, it was like 2AM in Korea so I could call during business hours- but it didn't help. After I called my bank to see why my billing address was wrong and fixed it; I finally, finally (two days later and multiple 46 minute hold times) bought my ticket (I was also trying to use a 20% off coupon I had been given because the last flight I had been on had a 12 hour delay. AND I had to reserve a cat in-cabin space. AND I had to buy my Economy Plus ticket, with it's 5 "extra" inches of leg room, otherwise I can't even push the cat carrier past the seat to the floor to slide it under the seat in front of me. Extra room my foot!!).

As a side note, my ENTIRE call to my bank took 9 minutes. And I didn't have to resort to the NATO phonetic alphabet to talk to him either. (of course when I DO use the phonetic alphabet, I just make it up and sound... fantastically uneducated).

I was thrilled and emailed and called everyone who would care to tell them I had bought my plane ticket.

Flash forward a few weeks.

Justin gets his paper work turned back to him because the people who needed to do their job didn't (basic Army nonsense). And then he turns in more paper work and is told that his dates are going to be later, but no, they still didn't have his orders.

So I had a choice to make; the new dates that Justin would be leaving put me in California without him for almost 5 weeks. I didn't want to be apart from him for that long for one thing. For another thing, I didn't want to leave him alone in Korea for that long (without even the cat to keep him company, because Gambit had to fly with me). And, I wanted to be there to help "close up shop", ship our person items, return our loaned army furniture and be there with the paper work that says they never delivered some of it when they try and charge us for stuff we never got. AND most importantly I wanted to be there when we closed out our apartment with the landlords so we could get our deposit back. You usually get the deposit back and we kept the place flawless and it's a hell of a lot of money that I AM going to get back.

All of these things added together means that I have to call the airlines and change my flight. I put it off for a while, but I finally called them and checked on a few things, like how much it could cost to change my flight, if the new date I was looking at had a pet in-cabin space, etc. I'm waiting until next week to actually change my flight in the hopes that Justin's orders will finally come through (he was supposed to get them in November btw) but if they don't I have to change my flight soon because my old fly date is Jan 18th.

After I get home and Justin is home with me too, I think we aren't going to fly anywhere for a while.